World War II and Social Class in Great Britain

Abstract

FROM the very earliest stages of the Second World War observers were sure that British class distinctions were being broken down. Vivienne Hall was a middle-class spinster in her early thirties, who lived at home with her mother in Putney in South West London, and worked as a shorthand-typist for the Northern Assurance Company in the City. When war broke out she volunteered to work in her local A.R.P. Report Centre. She kept a diary of her war experiences, most of which her mother discovered and destroyed — historians of seventeenth-century Holland are not the only ones to have difficulties with their sources. The record remains, however, of Miss Hall’s thoughts on the second day of war, 4 September 1939: ‘There is one thing, and one only, about this war — it is an instant and complete leveller of “classes”.’¹ About a year later, at the beginning of the Blitz, an American journalist reported home that ‘Hitler is doing what centuries of English history have not accomplished — he is breaking down the class structure of England’.² Many of the propaganda films of the war period often put forward this notion (though, of course, some of the best wartime feature films, such as Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve, present the enduring subtleties of the British class system). For some years after the war, historians were inclined to argue that some sort of social revolution had indeed taken place during the war.³

The author wishes to place on record his thanks for assistance of the Keeper of the Public Records and the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum.